Piano tricks and tips: Piano Clues and Christmas Carols

Piano site is a well built site with lots of tips for playing the piano. For me, especially interesting is the article about accompaniments. I think I am going to try some of those for this Christmas Carol season:)  http://www.pianoclues.com/2008/03/09/basic-pop-and-rock-accompaniment-patterns/

Speaking of Christmas, a site with free domain carols can come handy, too. This site also allows you to change a key with a click:
http://www.theoreticallycorrect.com/transposer/songs/Christmas-Carols/

Worship Songs Easy Accompaniment

A friend thaught me this:

(for 4/4 rythm)
Left hand: 1st note of a scale by a pinky, 5th note by the index finger, octave by a thumb and again 5th note by index finger.
Right hand: 135 at once.

Works for me:)

What to do with the chords?

For me this is still an open question. I have come to the point where I can play the chords of many songs. I can play major chords, minor chords, 7th chords and more, however the songs sound uninteresting with just the plain chords.

So I've tried different things:

Playing a base note( chord name note) with my left hand, chord with right hand. (for C it would be C in left hand and CEG in right hand)

Playing 3d and 5th tone of a chord and then 1st tone in left hand while playing the chord in right hand.(for C it would be EG,C in left hand and CEG in right hand)

For some songs in 3/4 rythm I use the easy waltz pattern in left hand (for the C chord: C, EG, EG).

Another thing which seems to work in some songs is to alternate the octaves where you play the same chord.

What else coud I do? Anyone having ideas please, cmment :) It's quite possible I may edit the post with your suggestions.

About this section

I've been trying to learn to play piano for about 10 years and still I don't consider myself a great piano player. But I've come across many sites which claim to have "free" lessons which are actually only a bit more than commercials for their lessons they have for sale.
I don't want to make money from teaching you about my views of music. I want to have a different profession than a music teacher. Playing music is just my hobby. This blog comes from the struggles I've made to find some decent free lessons about piano playing. I just wish to make it easier for others to learn how to play because I think music is an awesome art worth pursuing for anyone.
Some people who inspired me:

"Harmonica man" who lives to teach children how to play harmonica
Heartwoodguitar.com 
a site of a professional guitar teacher with really helpful free lessons for guitar beginners and lots of chord charts with strumming patterns - I've found the patterns very useful because most chord song databases don't show them.

Pianobychords.com is a simple method of teaching piano by chords but I couldn't manage to get trough all the lessons yet. I guess I will try to give it some time.
Pianofundamentals.com is a site about piano practice, with a downloadable pdf book and translated into various languages... I like the concepts though I haven't find the time to finish the book yet...

So that should be enough for an introduction. I'll try my best to put in this section all my insights of an unskilled person how to improve my poor piano playing with some easy to follow tricks.